Creating a plugin from scratch

When I say from scratch, it's not totally accurate, as we are going to use a plugin generator made by the Kibana team itself.

In this section, we'll first start to use Yeoman to generate a plugin and analyze its structure.

Yeoman - the plugin scaffolder

It's not obvious to start developing a Kibana, specifically when you don't know what the project structure looks like, what are the required dependencies, or how to build it. This is where Yeoman will you get started.

Note

Yeoman is a utility tool to scaffold new projects such as a Kibana plugin.

You can access more documentation from http://yeoman.io/ and specifically on the generator discovery section, http://yeoman.io/generators/, which allows searching for Yeoman generators:

Yeoman generator discovery

Yeoman needs to be installed using Node.js in order to be used; you just need to issue the following command:

npm install -g yo

We will also install the Kibana plugin generator, the code for which can be found at...